The American edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, which the
successful New York publishing house Harper and Brothers brought out in 1850,
was intended to both entertain and educate the 'great mass of the American
people' with its appealing blend of fiction, travelogues, biographies, and
droll social commentary, as well as occasional articles on topics like botany
or sanitary engineering (quoted in
Perkins 1985, p. 167). With its domestic
circulation soon reaching an average of 110,000, Harper's, as a later
editor claimed, could be considered as the very 'first truly popular magazine
...in America' ([Alden] 1884, pp. 165–66).
The actual contents of the magazine, however, were, from the very start, almost
entirely non-American, with Harper and Brothers taking advantage of the absence
of international copyright laws and reprinting the work of bestselling British
authors like Dickens and Thackeray at very little cost, while the magazine's
regular news-digests largely excluded American news and instead kept readers
abreast of political, social and cultural events on the other side of the
Atlantic. When rival American periodicals accused Harper's of being
'anti-American in feeling' and mockingly dubbed it 'a good foreign magazine',
Harper and Brothers responded by ensuring that their magazine became more
identifiably American (quoted in
Perkins 1985, p. 168). Harper's
nevertheless retained extremely close ties to Britain, so that when a European
edition of the magazine was launched in 1880 only minor modifications to the
original American format were required.

The objective of this ambitiously titled European edition (although in most
business correspondence it was referred to as simply an English edition) was
not only to increase the magazine's circulation, but also, as the
Bookseller warned, to establish a foothold for the ambitious Harper and
Brothers in the profitable British book publishing market (see
Brake 1994, p. 106;
Exman 1967, pp. 160–61). To facilitate the
publication of the new European edition of Harper's, a complicated
transatlantic arrangement was agreed between Richard Rogers Bowker, the London
agent of Harper and Brothers, and the British publishing firm Sampson Low,
Marston, Searle and Rivington. This stipulated that, in order to avoid British
copyright laws, the majority of the magazine's pages would continue to be
printed in America, although bearing the imprint of Sampson Low, and would then
be shipped across the Atlantic ahead of the traditional magazine day at the end
of each month, where appropriate adverts, and often some additional editorial
material, would be hastily appended by the British publisher, who would also
arrange for distribution and returns. A separate British editor was also
appointed to commission new articles and contribute some exclusive material to
the specifically British versions of the magazine's popular features 'Editor's
Easy Chair', 'Editor's Literary and Historical Record', and 'Editor's Drawer'.
However, as Laurel Brake has noted, the 'power base' of Harper's
'remained firmly in the US', and especially with its longstanding American
editor Henry Mills Alden (1836–1919) (see
Brake 1994, p. 107). Certainly, Andrew Lang
(1844–1912), the most prominent of the British editors of
Harper's, was constantly frustrated by his lack of real editorial
influence, depicting himself as a mere 'atrophied organ' largely disregarded by
those on the other side of the Atlantic (quoted in
Demoor 1987, p. 417). Indeed, Lang's period as
the British editor of Harper's was so ineffectual that scholars do not
even agree on its duration, and it seems probable that he was dismissed in
November 1885 after quarrelling with the leading contributor to the American
edition William Dean Howells, only to return as editor sometime later, and then
finally ended his involvement with the magazine in November 1889 (see
Demoor 1987, p. 417;
Brake 1994, p. 107). There is, moreover, no
record of who, if anyone, succeeded Lang as the editor of the magazine's
European edition.

Despite such complications in the magazine's production, the European
edition of Harper's successfully challenged the former hegemony of
similarly priced home-grown journals like the Cornhill Magazine and
Temple Bar, largely on account of the unmatched quality of the numerous
illustrations which enlivened its double-column pages. The magazine's
attractive format, its New York-based editor contended, had been honed by the
more dynamic tastes of American readers, and it was, as a consequence,
'especially rich in papers of travel, exploration, and adventure. But its
peculiar distinction is its illustration' (Alden
1884, p. 166). The superb parallel views of the skylines of London and
New York (drawn by Alfred Parsons and Edwin A. Abbey respectively) that
appeared on the wrappers of each monthly number impressed upon potential
purchasers both the cosmopolitan nature of the contents as well as the superior
quality of its illustrations. The success of Harper's, which was selling
over 25,000 copies in Britain by the mid-1880s, signalled the growing
internationalism of the British periodical marketplace during the final decades
of the nineteenth century, but it also stoked widespread fears over America's
impending commercial dominance. Perhaps in response to such anxieties, the
magazine's American editor envisaged Harper's as a 'minister of
...international goodwill', suggesting that 'our kin beyond the sea, as they
greet its familiar aspect, not as that of a stranger, but of a friend, will
feel more deeply the community of ennobling tradition ...which unites America
and England' (Alden 1884, p. 166). Such
elaborately ecumenical sentiments, however, could not disguise how little
Harper's was actually influenced by the involvement of either its
British publishers, whose principal responsibility lay with advertising, or its
largely superfluous British editor. Lang, when resigning his post in 1889,
reflected that British writers' 'M.S.S. were never accepted' for the magazine,
and he concluded that Harper and Brothers 'thought the game not worth the
candle' (Demoor, ed. 1989, p. 102). The
continued success of this almost wholly American-produced magazine in the
British periodical marketplace, however, nevertheless endows the European
edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine with a certain uniqueness and
fascination.

Notes on Indexing

The format of the European edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine
was essentially the same as that of the original American edition, with the
addition of a different wrapper, more relevant advertisements, and
occasionally, but by no means always, exclusive editorial material that covered
topics of specifically British interest. The pages produced in Britain and then
appended to rest of the magazine that was sent over from America were printed
on thinner, glossier paper, and also used a slightly smaller typeface.
Harper's was notorious for its censorship of fictional writing, most
notably an early version of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure in 1894, and
it was the house policy of Harper and Brothers to print only material that
could be read aloud before all members of the family (see
Perkins 1985, p. 168). Most aspects of
contemporary science, technology and medicine, however, were featured regularly
in the magazine, most notably in the optimistically titled 'Science and
Progress' section of the monthly 'Editor's Historical Record', but also in the
numerous travelogues, biographies, topical essays, and even the novels and
stories, which Harper's carried. In successive issues in the autumn of
1884, for instance, the magazine featured lengthy profiles of Charles Darwin
and Joseph Dalton Hooker, and, with an eye to patriotic readers back across the
Atlantic, recorded how both men had expressed a particular delight with America
and its people. At the same time, the long-running serialized novel Nature's
Serial Story, which ran for twelve numbers during 1884 and 1885, used its
sequential format to describe and explain the continuous seasonal changes
within the natural environment of the Hudson Valley, including discussions of
John Audubon's writings on ornithology and John Tyndall's researches on
spontaneous generation, while also keeping less scientifically-minded readers
interested in its protracted courtship plot (which was finally resolved with
the help of a scientific analogy). The SciPer Index gives equal weight to all
these different forms of scientific reference, and, with the exception of
occasional obituary columns in which the death of a scientific practitioner is
mentioned only in passing, all articles in which scientific subjects are
mentioned, or even merely alluded to, have an interpretative summary.

The Index covers the volumes of Harper's when Andrew Lang's
involvement with the magazine, as editor of the European edition, can be known
with certainty, i.e. from an unknown date in 1884 to November 1885 (see above).
Lang was a prolific man of letters whose interests in anthropology and
comparative philology, as well as many other broadly scientific subjects, are
well known, and these topics feature prominently in the identifiably British
editorial sections that appeared in Harper's during these years.
Certainly, these sections, which were presumably penned by Lang though this
cannot be known for certain, display an easy familiarity with the very latest
developments in fields such as anthropology, ethnology, and comparative
philology and mythology, and they often depart markedly from the avowed
populism of the magazine's American publishers in discussing recondite and
technical scientific details and in insisting on the need for specialist
researchers. The 'Editor's Literary Record' in the November 1884 number, for
instance, lambasted Friedrich Max Müller and Albert Réville for
wasting their time lecturing on the history and evolution of religion to
audiences whose 'interest is still, on the whole, thoroughly "popular" and
unscientific', and complained that such scholars seemed 'content not to advance
science, nor to consolidate it, but merely to popularise the elements of
knowledge' ([Lang] 1884, p. 964). The erudite
discussion of such specialist scientific matters in the editorial sections
printed in Britain was frequently juxtaposed with eulogistic, and copiously
illustrated, accounts from across the Atlantic of the scientific and
technological aspects of America's rampant industrialisation and continued
westward expansion, as exemplified by articles on 'The Drainage of the
Everglades' and 'Modern Sanitary Engineering' which appeared in successive
numbers during the spring of 1884. While the Index covers only four volumes of
the European edition of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it provides,
amongst other things, a vivid insight into the information on international,
and especially American, forms of science that was readily available to even
the most parochially-minded readers of general periodicals in late Victorian
Britain.

Brake, Laurel 1994. 'Harper's New Monthly Magazine: American
Censorship, European Decadence, and the Periodicals Market in the 1890s', in
Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth
Century, London: Macmillan, 104–24